Otis Books is pleased to publish Tim Erickson’s debut collection of poetry, Egopolis, a textual journey through destruction, resistance, city, and the Ego, from ancient times to the present day. Erickson’s work has appeared in the Chicago Review, Western Humanities Review, and the Salt Anthology of New Writing. He lives in Salt Lake City.

Exquisite Beauty is the first retrospective and publication to document the eye-dazzling ceramics created by Ralph Bacerra (1938–2008), a Los Angeles–based artist known for his innovative approach to surface embellishment. Curated by Jo Lauria, the exhibition features more than ninety of the artist’s finest pieces—dramatic, highly decorated vessels and sculptures that have never before been the focus of a major exhibition or publication.

David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and currently teaches at USC. He is the author of the novels Little, The Hiawatha, The Translation of Dr. Apelles, named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, as well as a critical work, Native American Fiction: A User's Manual. In 2012, he published another nonfiction work, Rez Life.

Angela Flournoy’s first novel The Turner House was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her fiction has appeared in TheParis Review, and she has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University. She lives in Los Angeles.

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. With David Remnick she co-edited the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and in 2010, the inaugural winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, Choi lives in Brooklyn.

Related Links

Researching Concepts

A successful Contemporary Project is dependent on finding good material to use, then organizing, and communicating that material to your classmates. You may need to do some additional research and reading about your class themes (e.g. Transnationalism, Gender, Body). This type of problem-based research and learning requires a lot more creativity and critical thinking than simply researching an artist by name.
Please look carefully at the example below to see how the research process can be used to help generate ideas and focus your topic. The following citations found in Art Index and OmniFile:

Example: transnationalismAND (artORdesign) (more on Boolean syntax)
Other terms or related topics which could be good alternative keywords for your project on transnationalism. Notice especially which terms are used in the subject fields.

The Spirit of the Ancestors: The Photography and Installation Art of Albert Chong and Wura-Natasha Ogunji

postcolonial

diaspora

environment

African influences

specific artists: Chong, Ogunji

SOURCE:

Canadian Woman Studies v. 23 no. 2 (Winter 2004) p. 14-20

ABSTRACT:

Part of a special issue on women and the black diaspora. The writer investigates the photography and installationart of the African diaspora. She argues that this visual art is embodied in a set of assumptions that stems primarily from the contexts of ritual and scared spaces, postcolonial urban struggles, and transnationalism.

Part of a special issue on feminism, race, and transnationalism. The writer analyzes two photographic works by Annu Palakunnathu Matthew: Bollywood Satirized, 1998-2001, and An Indian from India, 2001. The two series are particularly interesting in the way they identify and communicate a counterhegemonic position on diaspora and transnational identities and coalitions: The former rereads Bollywood's popular culture, and the latter calls into question the archives and rationale of Western identity formation. The two agendas are linked in that they enable the feminist political exposure of globalization's transcultural depoliticizing agenda. They express Matthew's activist challenge because both these interventionist photographic collages politicize the postmodern.

A review of "Crossings," an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from August 7 to November 1, 1998. The show consisted of installations by 15 international artists, most of whom work and live in places other than that of their birth. Rather than the modernist "linear" crossings from origin to destination, local to global, or authentic to unauthentic, the artistic and curatorial work rendered an ambivalent multiplicity of criss-crossings that radically de-essentialized ideas of place, home, origin, and identity. The show successfully unsettled the relationship between the national and international and resonated with echoes of transnationalism and transculturalism.

Helpful Research Facts

You may want to review the guides and tutorials found through the Information Literacy link on every library webpage. A very good Art History Writing Guide is available from University of NC at Chapel Hill.

Locating Older Journal Articles

You won't always find everything online in full-text. You may need to find an article in a print version of a periodical. The Otis collection of back issues of journals and magazines is quite good. The Library has hundreds of bound volumes of back issues. Some are in the Stacks and some in Annex, which requires paging. Check the Otis holdings to see exactly what we have and where it's kept.

Assistance Is Readily Available

The librarians and the library staff are your friends. Ask for reference or computer troubleshooting any time. The SRC also has tutors available to assist you with the writing of papers. Start early so that you will have time to avail yourself of these services. We all want to support your learning experience.